Coneflower Soul

Movies and television would have you believe that only the most superstitious among us believe in divination. They portray these characters as sweet, well-meaning, but gullible. You know, the schtick: smart American teenager dragged along to the fortune teller by their grandma or an aunt who hangs on every word the readers says while the kid rolls her eyes. Sometimes they throw us a bone and have something happen to teenager that is uncanny and the reader predicted it. Teen considers for a moment that divination is not so silly and they leave you wondering.

But is that what really goes on?

No.

Do I have superstitious clients? Yes, and so does my accountant and dentist and auto mechanic … but I have lots of clients who aren’t what you’d consider superstitious. They are intelligent, well educated, and understand that something bigger is going on in the world; something more than what they can see right in front of them. Together we tap into that to help them steer their lives accordingly.

There was:

~ A school principal who needed a strategy for dealing with a resistant school board. I pulled cards and together we designed a game plan for her school that benefited her students and didn’t irritate the board.

~ An IT specialist who needed help deciding which career path was best for him.

~ A Special Ed teacher who was meeting administrative roadblocks for implementing some excellent programs. Tarot showed us where the blockages were and how to deal with them.

~ The charming young woman who was presented with a career opportunity she never expected and didn’t know how to navigate.

~ The business owner who wasn’t sure if he should relocate his shop or open a second location.

These are all serious people. They are smart, educated, thoughtful, and know to make use of the tools available no matter how unconventional. Aside from that one episode of MadMen, I’ve never seen this side of Tarot portrayed on TV.

For the last couple of years I’ve been part of a group of amazing women. We get together somewhat regularly to brainstorm about life, our businesses, family, health, and to share laughs over a potluck lunch. This past Saturday was our most recent meeting and our first since the election. Among the many things we discussed were our concerns for the future.

Around this table were women dealing with unemployed spouses, adult children who have had their jobs go overseas, healthcare issues for ourselves and our children, the ever increasing tax burden here in New York, and all the concerns those issues bring up.

Every candidate who ran for president had a voter or a voter’s relative at this table. Some of us actively participated in the Women’s March. Some of us gave it our support in other ways and some of us didn’t.

I love these ladies. We have a wonderful, enriching time whenever we get together. We don’t all agree with each other about everything and that is never an obstacle to friendship and support.

As always the tarot cards come out when we get together. We read for each other, discuss the readings and come up with strategies for going forward and using that information. This time we decided to add a reading for the United States. We focused on the big concepts that vex most of us: the economy, our international situation, and our social situation.

We pulled three cards from The Urban Tarot. If you are friends with me on Facebook you know this is currently my deck of the month. The question was a mashup of “What can we expect from the economy?” and “What can we do to be okay in the coming economy?”

Here’s a closer look.

We were all in agreement that the Knight of Cups, called The Seducer in this deck, represented that promises made during the recent political campaigns. The candidates for president, and the local offices that were up, each promised prosperity and jobs and lower taxes and healthcare and free puppies and chocolate… basically we know they say what they feel they need to say to get elected. If you have ever had the opportunity to speak to a politician who wants your vote it is very much like speaking to a guy who is trying to get in your pants. Perfect card.

The second card is the 9 of Wands, named Fortitude in this deck. We discussed this one for a while. The figure is a postal worker and the building is the main post office building in Manhattan. The figure in the card is working hard in the cold and dark alone. He is separate from the huge bureaucracy he works for even though he wears a uniform representing them. He’s working hard. He’s standing his ground and doing his job for his own reasons. To us this represented hard work. We may feel overwhelmed and in the shadow of much larger forces beyond our control but we need to keep working and keep the focus on our reasons for that work.

The last card is The Empress. She is a happy mother feeding her baby in a sunny room. We were all relieved to see this card. The Empress is abundance and creativity. It may be that creativity will be needed to find our way forward or the solutions that present themselves from the people pulling the strings of our economy will be more creative than we have come to expect. All around this reading is hopeful.

Yes, we all bought into some sleazy lines and now have that morning after feeling but with some focused hard work and creativity we will be okay.

We then turned our attention to the international scene.

We pulled The Moon and Strength. These are both Major Arcana cards. The Major Arcana usually show up when events are of karmic importance, or related to our destiny, or lessons our soul is here to learn. These cards are for the U.S. and her foreign policy and international relations. To us they said there is a lot we haven’t seen clearly/don’t see clearly. The Moon is about illusions and how things aren’t really as they seem to be. Think of how the world looks at night when you walk around outside and the only light is from the moon. You don’t see most of what is going on around you and what you do see looks very different from how it really is in bright daylight. We expect that things will be revealed and illusions made obvious. This card also speaks of the anxiety many people are feeling regarding our place in the world and the world’s relations with us.

Strength is us getting a grip on all that anxiety and calling things as we see them. It is us standing tall and not being reactive or impulsive but operating from a place of courage and self-confidence. As a nation it is the U.S. not taking any shit. As a people it is remembering that this country is ‘We the People’ and reminding the politicians who work for us that we are paying attention, and we want the truth.

For the social situation we pulled The Emperor, 5 of Pentacles, and 6 of Wands.

The Emperor is a force to be reckoned with. He is a powerful figure who can be energetically overwhelming to those who interact with him. He knows what he wants and he’s not afraid to go get it. As soon as this card showed up we all said “Trump” and laughed because it really is a perfect card for him right now. It is important to note that this is also a Major Arcana card and to us that said he was inevitable in many ways. He is here in this place and time to bring about change as he sees it.

To see the 5 of Pentacles show up next makes a lot of sense too. It is worry and poverty and the feeling of rejection. Those feelings are what motivated many to vote for Mr. Trump in the first place and are the feelings that other people fear will be the future now that he has won.

The 6 of Wands however says that all will be well. There is victory and celebration to come. We suspect that when more time passes and the fears don’t manifest people will calm down and realize that sky is not falling and the end is not nigh.

To wrap it all up and get an outlook on what Mr. Trump’s tenure will be like we pulled one last card.

This card is usually called Judgment, in this deck it’s call The Aeon. The figure is walking along the American Immigrant Wall of Honor on Ellis Island. She is touching a name engraved there and the reflection of her ancestor is visible on the wall. The word aeon refers to an age, a period of time. Robin Scott, who created this deck used this image to show the connections through time and how life is really judged by how we live it and what we leave behind. This card speaks of the cyclical nature of life and of the things we do in that life.

That the image is from the Ellis Island museum felt very hopeful to us all regarding the hysteria around the reports of Mr. Trump’s comments about immigrants during the campaign. He will be judged on his actions not his words. The scene is quite peaceful and loving and taking place on a sunny day. That felt hopeful too.

Mr. Trump is just one of many presidents. We hope, for our own sakes, and for the United States as a whole, that he is a good president and that we will find ourselves better off in four years than we are right now.

Friday is the official start of Readers Studio and every year it opens with a ritual, interviews of the master class instructors and the famous Foundation Reading. The Foundation Reading is what it sounds like: the first reading of the weekend. It is a baseline. You partner up with someone, read for each other and make a record of the reading. Then on Sunday, after you’ve taken all the classes, you meet back up with this same partner, lay out the same reading and reinterpret it using your newly learned skills.

Rhonda was my partner. She’s an amazing person. She did a reading for me and as soon as I saw the cards I got emotional. The 6 of cups reversed, The World reversed, 9 of swords, 2 of cups reversed it was all about losing my dad and the emotional waves and ripples that has sent through my life. Rhonda didn’t know about Dad and was trying to find a way to gently ask some questions. I let her off the hook and gave her a synopsis. We were both weepy and agreed that this loss is coloring everything I’ve been doing for the last few months and will be an influence for months to come. We also agreed that any readings I received all weekend would probably touch this subject. I decided right there to just stick with my few close friends instead of table hopping just to keep from having to share this over and over with new people. I had no trouble reading for other people, which is good or I don’ t know how much I would have gotten out of the seminar.

After a lunch buffet on Friday, the lovely and talented Nancy Antenucci took the stage. As you may remember, I love her book, so I was really looking forward to her class. She did not disappoint. We did several exercises to get out of our heads and into the moment. The most interesting for me was when she had us all mill about the ballroom and interact with each other wordlessly. We were to walk around as if everyone was our friend, as if no one was our friend, as if one of these people was the chosen one, as if one of these people had a special message just for us. It was remarkable how differently we responded to each other because of the underlying thinking we were doing.

The quote from Nancy that stuck with me is “Honor the human in you and let it go … for now, so you can go deeper.”

Saturday is the busiest day of Readers Studio. There is an optional breakfast class, two master classes, a costume banquet, several evening classes to choose from and the socializing that gets tucked in and around those classes. You could be going from 7am to 11pm before spending hours in the lobby or the bar with your friends.

Major Tom Schick taught the first master class on Saturday. He is a very nice guy, the creator of Major Tom’s Tarot of Marseilles, and he knows his stuff. After half an hour in his class I was getting nothing but agitated. Sorry, Tom. I actually packed up my bag and made as quiet and inconspicuous an exit as I could. Other people stayed for the whole class and you can read James Wells’ blog about it here. I met up with a few other people and we spent an hour in the readers’ lounge doing a Mary K. Greer tarot circle.

After lunch Ferol Humphrey took hold of that ballroom/classroom and didn’t let go. Her class was fast paced and kept us on our toes and moving through the cards. We went around the table as quickly as possible finishing sentences like “I accept…/I reject…” We worked at speed and then we went deeper into the cards. I’ve been a member of her Living Tarot group on Facebook for quite a while and her posts always get me thinking and doing. To do those Living Tarot exercises in person is a much different experience. It’s not better or worse; it’s a different level.

The banquet was fun, as it always is. There was entertainment provided by the more theatrical and musical members of our group which included some truly funny moments. Then there was Ciro Marchetti’s farewell. He is retiring from tarot work after ten years as a deck designer and moving on to other kinds of artwork. He showed a video of his new career in Las Vegas, which was, of course, a joke. He then followed it with this stunning computer generated compilation of his tarot work. I am sorry to see him go. No one tells a bad joke quite the way Ciro does. I wish him and his lovely and patient wife, Maria, all the best.

After the banquet I took a class lead by the amazing James Wells. He had us really get into the cards in a meditative way and we practiced with one card. I chose the Knight of Swords because it had been coming up in readings all weekend. I’ve been reading tarot on and off for almost thirty years and his class and this practice shifted my perception of the Knight of Swords and the knights in general. It was powerful.

Sunday, the final day of the conference, started with another Breakfast Roundtable discussion. We then met up with our original foundation reading partners and re-read that spread using the new skills we had learned. There was one last round of classes and I chose to learn from Carrie Paris. I’ve long felt that the online reading experience is lacking something and her class not only addressed this issue and identified exactly what was missing but gave me a bag full of tools and ideas to round out the enterprise and make it more satisfying for both myself and my clients.

There were warm good-byes throughout the day as people left to catch flights home. We were given our certificates and had some great conversations over lunch and during the more unstructured afternoon. At one point we were talking to Barbara Moore and she handed me a copy of her soon to be release Book of Shadows: So Below  tarot deck as a gift. It’s a very nice companion to the first volume Book of Shadows: As Above. After I have played with it a bit I’ll post a full review here.

All in all it was great. I have yet to come away from Readers Studio feeling like I wasted my time and money. Quite the contrary. It’s wonderful energy to soak in all weekend and now, a week and half later, I’m still processing it all. And yes, I’ll be going back next year.

This is the eleventh year for Readers Studio. I’ve been coming for the last five. This year, for the first time, a full additional day was added. This day is the first Tarot and Psychology Conference and the brainchild of Dr. Arthur Rosengarten, the author of Tarot and Psychology. Dr. Rosengarten was to be one of the instructors but fell ill and was unable to attend. With just two days notice Mary K. Greer stepped up and taught a class in his place. Dr. David Van Nuys, Emeritus Professor of Psychology from Sonoma State University and Dr. Elinor Greenberg, a private practice psychologist in New York City were the other two presenters.

One thing I frequently caution my clients about is managing expectations. It’s nearly impossible to enter a situation without having some expectations about the experience and/or the outcome. It’s fine to have an idea of how the day is going to go but we set ourselves up for disappointment when we are attached to what we think things are supposed to be. I wasn’t sure what to expect from a Tarot and Psychology conference but based on past experience at Readers Studio I expected to be introduced to a concept, be educated about the concept and then have some training in the practical application of the concept. That is not exactly how this day went.

The first speaker, Dr. Van Nuys is a psychologist first and so his presentation was not what I expected from a tarot conference but what I would expect at a psychology conference and that is not what I wanted. His talk, “Hypnotic Dream Induction and Tarot for Powerful Insights”, was interesting in parts but not compelling enough to keep my mind from wandering. Because his primary focus is psychology it seemed like the practical application of his technique didn’t really require tarot and the tarot portion felt as if it were patched onto an already existing practice. For personal use this may be handy but I don’t see it translating into a service I can offer clients. I may change my mind after I’ve played with this a while.

Dr. Greenberg’s presentation was “Tarot as a Therapeutic Tool” and she walked us through the process and rationale for having clients create their own oracles. We did this by doing it ourselves. The concept is to find your theme for a deck based on your particular need for guidance, assign meaning to images and put them on the cards. Later on the cards are drawn at random to provide guidance by reminding the clients/ourselves what we already know. There is more to it than just this. Working with a client to create a small stack of focused reminders would be very useful for dealing with ongoing issues they are experiencing. When situations arise in line with the theme, the cards act as touchstones grounding the person using them and reminding them of what they know and in some cases advising them of actions to take. Plus, we got to play with  markers and stickers; always a crowd pleaser.

Then came Mary K. Greer. She did a presentation on “Intuition and Transference” that was impressive considering she had only about two days to put it all together. Mary understands the audience she was teaching to and explained psychological terms and theories that could be pertinent to a tarot practice. She took it a bit further and dissected Intuition in a way that I don’t entirely agree with. It surprised me. She came at it from a clinical point of view and gave a definition that belongs in a psych textbook written by someone who has never experienced a flash of intuition and that is not something I expected from Mary Greer. In fact the whole presentation was so very different from the last class I took with Mary that it rattled me a bit. She discussed tarot, intuition, psychic flashes and other phenomenon that her audience takes for granted but she did so in a rather detached and analytical way that most of us weren’t ready for. There was some fascinating information included like the existence of mirror neurons and the function they are believed to perform but there was also some concepts that seemed to dismiss the spiritual aspect of tarot reading. That right there is where my resistance to this marriage of psychology and tarot lies.

I wasn’t disappointed exactly nor do I think I wasted time and money on this conference. Not at all. I didn’t know precisely what I was getting myself into but I took a chance. This was the first year for this conference and I expect that next year’s will be better. There is an argument to made that tarot is a form of therapy and Carl Jung himself was a fan. His concepts of archetypes, synchronicity and the collective unconscious all intertwine with the tarot. It’s the need of science to strip away the spiritual that I find most offensive. It’s particularly hard to take from psychology: the study of the psyche, a part of us and our experience that cannot really be measured and dissected.  In its zeal to be taken seriously like the harder sciences of physics and chemistry, psychology is selling its soul. I just don’t want it to take tarot with it.